Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Letting Go | 1961 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 2 | When She Was Good | 1966 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 3 | Portnoy’s Complaint | 1969 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 4 | Our Gang | 1971 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 5 | The Great American Novel | 1973 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 6 | The Counterlife | 1986 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 7 | Deception | 1990 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 8 | Patrimony | 1991 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 9 | Operation Shylock | 1993 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 10 | Sabbath’s Theater | 1995 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 11 | His Mistress’s Voice | 1995 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 12 | The Plot Against America | 2004 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 13 | Everyman | 2006 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 14 | Indignation | 2008 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 15 | The Humbling | 2009 | Philip Roth | Buy |
| 16 | Nemesis | 2010 | Philip Roth | Buy |
Roth’s standalone novels are where some of his most experimental and varied work lives. Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, is a comic monologue from a man confessing his obsessions and resentments to a silent therapist. It made Roth famous and scandalous in equal measure and still reads as funny and sharp.
Sabbath’s Theater, from 1995, follows an aging puppeteer whose life is unraveling and is probably Roth’s darkest and most relentless novel. The Plot Against America, published in 2004, imagines a 1940s America where Charles Lindbergh wins the presidency and antisemitism becomes a more visible part of public life. Nemesis, his last novel, is quieter and more elegiac, set during a polio epidemic in Newark.
These books show how widely Roth ranged across his career even within the territory he returned to most often, American Jewish life, masculinity, and the gap between how people think of themselves and how they actually behave.